The Yik Yak app is officially dead

Yik Yak will be shutting down its anonymous chat app in the next
week as the school year draws to a close, the company
announced on Friday.

The anonymous chat app used to be valued at $4oo million after
raising more than $73 million in venture capital.

At its prime, Yik Yak was considered the darling of the anonymous
messaging space, having attracted a young user base of college
students that would compulsively open the app multiple times a
day to stay informed. However, Yik Yak had trouble enticing
people to stick around, especially as Snapchat took off.

"We were so lucky to have the most passionate users on the
planet. It’s you who made this journey possible," the founders
said in their good-bye note. "The time has come, however, for
our paths to part ways, as we’ve decided to make our next moves
as a company."

The app will be winding down at the end of the school year, the
founders, Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, said. Some of the
engineering talent will be joining Square at their office in
Atlanta. Bloomberg
initially reported that the payments company had spent $3
million to bring on some of the engineering team, but
an SEC filing later on Friday from Square revealed that it
only spent $1 million for employment agreements and to
license certain intellectual property from the company.

Founded in 2013, Yik Yak
at first grew rapidly as high schoolers and college students
latched onto the anonymous messaging app. However, the company
faced problems with harassment and bullying in the app and never
quite found a good way to combat it. Last August,
it made a move to do away with anonymous and add real
profiles, but it never took off in the same way again. Yik Yak
laid off
60% of its team at the end of 2016.

Now, Yik Yak will be shuttering the app as what's left of the
company starts "tinkering around with what’s ahead for our
brand, our technology, and ourselves."

"Building Yik Yak – both the app you used and the company that
powered it – was the greatest, hardest, most enjoyable, most
stressful, and ultimately most rewarding experience we’ve ever
had," the founders said.